Could I have a detailed headcanon for Jay Gatsby?
I haven’t read The Great Gatsby since my junior year of high school so hopefully I can remember enough here…
He’s got a very obsessive personality. His obsession with Daisy is one of the main themes of the book. At first, it manifests in his fixation with the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and it intensifies once he’s reunited with Daisy through Nick.
Daisy is actually even kind of a special interest to him; he thinks about her all the time and even infodumps about her (to Nick).
He’s got very black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. This manifests when he demands that Daisy tell Tom she never loved him. He isn’t willing to settle for Daisy assuring him that she doesn’t love Tom anymore; he wants her to also tell him that she never loved Tom.
Another example of his obsession and “different” way of thinking is in one of his iconic exchanges with Nick (“You can’t repeat the past.” “Why of course you can!”). Gatsby is so obsessed with Daisy that he wants to recreate the life he feels like he missed out on with her; he’s not satisfied to just start off where they are.
Spends a lot of time alone, isolating himself from the rest of the world, probably refilling his social energy after interacting with people at parties and in speakeasies and such. Nick and Daisy are two of the few people he actively seeks one-on-one time with.
Another example of his “different” way of thinking is how he recreates an entire new identity for himself, as Nick later finds out. He doesn’t feel like he can be successful under his old identity; he has to create a new identity and essentially become a new person to put his “poor” past behind him and become a wealthy man.
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